Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Yes, Really with Wilde.Dash #25: Bad Lieutenant (1992)

The usual caveat: Believe it or not, for someone totally obsessed with movies, I do a lot of selective editing, snubbing, and ignoring. That is to say: there are a whole lot of well-known movies I've actually never bothered to watch. I've spent a lot of time hunting down obscurities and not quite as much time seeing the movies you've probably been watching since you were 10 years old. Because of this, in conversation I frequently have this interaction. Me: "I've never actually seen that movie" You: "What? I've seen a movie you haven't?" Me: "Yes" You: "How have you not seen that movie?" Me: "I never wanted to" You: "Really?" Me: "Yes, really." Thus: Yes, Really with Wilde.Dash a feature in which I fill in my pop culture education, watch all the boring basics, and let you know whether or not I decided they were worth my time.

I hate writing about films that are actually pretty decent
for this feature. Mostly because what
needs to be said has already been said in nearly every way imaginable, but also
because these mini essays boil down to something that’s less free form ranting
and more straight criticism. So, you can imagine how disappointed I was when
nothing in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant really
jumped out at me as a tipping point in either direction. I’ve literally been trying to come up with an
interesting angle for Bad Lieutenant
discussion since the beginning of December.
Now, it’s Christmas time and I’m still scratching my head and wondering
whether it’s better to just outline the weird, hellish things that happen here
or to try to figure out just how much this film and Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans have
to do with one another.

Actually, now that I
mention it, the one thing that really befuddles me about the similarly titled
films is how it was possible that the Nicolas Cage starring Port of Call could crib the title and be
“neither remake or sequel” to Ferrara’s 1992 film? I’m not one to question Herzog when he tells
me something, but it seems tremendously odd that the man claims never to have
seen a Ferrara film prior to shooting his film when the two stories do have a
fair amount in common. Perhaps all films
about corrupt cops should simply be released under the Bad Lieutenant
title. Maybe Training Day could have been amped up and called Bad Lieutenant: Lamer than the Other
One.

I kid. Compared to
the tripped out insanity of Nic Cage’s performance in Port of Call, the ‘original’ ran a little south of my
expectations. Comparatively: it was
dismal and serious. Here, Harvey Keitel stars as our unnamed Lieutenant. For a long while, the camera follows him as
he runs through his criminal rounds. The
Lieutenant is supposed to be investigating the devastating rape of a nun, but
instead he spends most of his time gallivanting with prostitutes, chasing the
dragon, tripping out stark naked in a crack house, and trying to blackmail
young ladies he pulls over for speeding violations into performing sexual
favors. The most vivid, reprehensible
scene is one in which our antihero threatens and demeans two teenage sisters
until one shows him her ass and the other feigns oral sex (on the air) while he
jerks off. This goes on for way too long
and is about as uncomfortable to watch as it sounds. You may wonder as you watch it if it’s
actually a hugely effective way of illustrating just how low the Lieutenant is,
or if it’s a sort of exercise in seeing just how many times Keitel can nastily
use a euphemism for his genitalia within a span of five minutes. It’s worth noting that Port of Call has a scene like this as well, in which Cage’s
lieutenant actually has sex with a woman and forces her boyfriend to
watch.

Obviously, both characters are real charmers. Keitel’s,
though, has none of the demented joy present in Cage’s performance. Cage, as is his nature, had a manic energy
that tended to push things towards the comedic.
He’s a loose cannon, sure. He’s
remarkably dangerous, yes. But, we’re
trained to find a raging Nic Cage fairly humorous whereas Harvey Keitel is, by
comparison, a scary son of a bitch. Keitel’s entire countenance is more frightening
than Cage’s. There’s nothing funny about
him. He looks like he’s seen things,
horrible things, and they never left him.
I don’t know why, but I have trouble imagining Keitel laughing, not even
a maniacal laugh. I know I’ve seen it
happen before, but I can’t conjure the image.
His entire face is too weighed down by the burden he carries from his
visit to the lowest circles of hell. I
believe Keitel’s character more. The nastiness of the performance forces the
obviously culty, over the top elements to be repressed in favor of true grit
and hard boiled crime. It’s an
exploitation flick, of sorts, but everything about Keitel’s character reeks of
a loathsome desperation. For brief seconds, he seems to want to change, to want
to do something good. These solutions usually come in the form of revenge. An
eye for an eye will help him heal. He
never succeeds, and it never does. Instead, he makes things worse.

We begin to realize that the Lieutenant is suffering from a torment that’s self-inflicted, as if he’s decided to just go the extra mile and flagellate himself until he gets what’s coming to him. He wants to be punished, he probably wants to die; his regrets are so numerous he can no longer effectively repent, so he doesn’t try to make good. Towards the end of the film, Keitel crawls screaming on the floor of a church as a placid hallucination of Christ looks on. It’s an unnervingly odd moment of visual throat-jamming in what, I would argue, is at heart a dark morality play. I read this Bad Lieutenant the way I tend to read Bret Easton Ellis: all of the brutality, the vulgarity, the mean-spirited nihilism, and drug use are not depictions of something darkly entertaining but are instead meant to disturb and shake the audience into a realization that none of this pays. Message received, Bad Lieutenant. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like very much to never see Harvey Keitel naked again.